They remain the leading cause of death even after decades of drug discoveries aimed at preventing heart attacks. The pills and injections on the market do the job of lowering the cholesterol that causes a heart attack. Some won't stick to treatment plans that can last the rest of their lives because they don't have access to them. The body's instruction manual could be altered to stop the build up of bad cholesterol.
Those who have already had a heart attack because of extremely high cholesterol caused by a hereditary condition will be targeted by Verve. If it works to reduce low-density lipoprotein (LDL), the company would look to widen the treatment pool and give it to young people as a preventive measure.
The company is backed by a number of investors, including Arch Venture Partners and F-Prime Capital. It went public in June with a market cap of over $3 billion. Its value has fallen along with the rest of the sector.
When he was a geneticist at Harvard, Kathiresan discovered that people with low levels of cholesterol were protected from heart attacks. He is trying to replicate that phenomenon by turning off cholesterol-raising genes. Two genes are being focused on by Verve. The first treatment will be after PCSK9. Some patients need only one drug, while others need both. The company uses a tool to change a single letter of a person's genome. The editing system is protected by a lipid nanoparticle, which turns off the desired gene.
After two weeks, the treatment cut bad cholesterol levels in monkeys by 59%, and it lasted six months later. Verve is set to begin testing in humans within months, but it will be years before it has enough evidence of the drug's safety and efficacy to consider seeking approval from regulators.
Verve will face a lot of obstacles in its attempt to treat the poor. It's one of the first tests of using Crispr to edit DNA inside the human body, and patients and doctors could be wary of making a permanent change without knowing much about long-term safety. She says that reluctance to take Covid-19 vaccines suggests that some people may not want to change their genes.
Michael Sherman, chief medical officer at Point, says that Verve will need to convince insurers that it is worth covering when it will be more expensive than other options.
The cost of a month's supply of Statins is $9. The self-injectable medicines that emerged a few years ago, known as PCSK9 inhibitors, are better at lowering cholesterol than vastatin and require only a few weeks of administration. The makers of the injections haven't been able to sway insurers even when targeting the highest-risk people with hypercholesterolemia, despite cutting prices by more than half. Some people are wary of self-injections.
Verve's therapy will cost between $50,000 and $200,000 per patient, according to analysts. The estimated range is a reasonable starting point, but companies rarely reveal much about pricing before their products hit the market.
Millions of people don't take advantage of existing treatments and an infusion given to a young person could fundamentally alter their risk for the rest of their lives. It might have helped his brother, who died of a heart attack at 42.
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